Understanding how offline activities are impacting the online marketing strategy is one of the most challenging tasks marketers have to handle. We are in a constant race to win the omni-channel attribution.
Imagine you are running e-commerce shop and your amazing website has a conversion rate of 1.5%, you are reporting monthly revenue for 1 million €. What is happening to the remaining 98.5% of your traffic that is not converting? Your website is conversions optimized and you did your best to create the best online experience. Some customers might have bought from your shop after calling the call center or after receiving an email from the tech support. There are many things happening on your website and it is fundamental to track and measure the holistic impact of your activities, both online and offline. That’s the reason why we should care about measuring the multichannel impact.
Why tracking offline impact is so challenging?
Simply because we don’t have a way to join the offline and online data!
For most of the websites, the data we are collecting is unique online and it is anonymous. If you have a customer on the phone, they might be able to give to your their email address, their credit card details but not the unique cookie ID.
The quantification of your online and offline activities is hard job but it is not impossible. We have to be a bit more thoughtful, creative and pragmatic.
We collected 5 tips to track your offline conversions.
1. Use unique coupons, voucher codes
This is not hard. You can create unique voucher codes and then track the redemption of those coupons for your offline activities.
2. Benefit of onexit online surveys
From quantitative analysis, we are not moving more into the direction of qualitative analysis. Are you afraid to ask your customers if they liked your product? Why don’t you ask them if your product impacted their lives in a positive way? You can ask if your visitors are more likely to buy online or to buy at your store.
Another good idea is to set-up point of sales surveys.
3. Set-up controlled experiments
I buy clothes quite often from Zara. Every store in Berlin has different types of clothes, the selection is slightly different if you buy at Alexanderplatz or in Friedriechstraße. This doesn’t apply merely to Zara. Companies sometimes are running controlled experiments to validate their ideas.
4. Do it old school with market research
Well, for a proper market research you must invest a bit of your monetary resources but this is how our offline bros and sis do it. Market research is always a good idea: interviews, focus groups, field surveys and much more.
5. Measure estimated visits with PPC and clicks
At the end of 2014, Google AdWords introduced to Google conversions tracking an estimate of store visits. Basically by linking a verified store location from Google Maps with your AdWords account, Google will give an estimated number of store visits within 30 days of your PPC ads being clicked. This is still an estimation but it can give you very good insights about which PPC campaign is bringing most of the traffic / conversions.
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